Book Review: More Than This
More Than This, a juvenile fiction about friendship, love, betrayal, redeemability, and emerging adulthood, traced the protagonist Seth’s mysterious circumstance becoming entangled in turmoil. At the beginning of the novel, we are informed that an unnamed boy seemed to feel sorrow and trouble because something happened to him. It annoyed him and made him feel upset — even lose his faith in life. As readers, however, we do not know while may want to know what happened to this boy. As a result of his melancholy, he decided to commit suicide himself in the sea. ‘Here is the boy, drowning’, which is the first sentence of the novel that the author used to start this narration, without any implying or presaging information for the readers.
But, what’s happened? Who was that boy? Why did he drown? And what’s next? Anyway, what I could do was to guess and then to continue my reading in suspense — as the blurb said, ‘just read it’.
The author used a suspenseful but attractive way to plot — a boy drowning to death. Except for amounts of confusions and curiosities, the vivid description of Seth’s dying process enabled me not only to empathise his feelings of annoyance and disappointment but also to picture this scene: A shirtless boy was walking slowly and absent-mindedly toward the freezing sea deeper and deeper, while ahead, the sky was grey and cloudy, and the clouds were heavy and low. You could see and hear, white seagulls swirled above and cried harshly, while the waves coming again and again chopped angrily at the rocks. And then you might witness the receding figure of a boy, in the sea, ready to be drowning.
As for me, I very appreciated this first chapter, which I believed was the most stupendous part of the whole book, especially the sensory descriptions about Seth’s final try to struggle with his death under the sea:
‘It has bled all the energy from his body and contracted his muscles into a painful uselessness, no matter how much he fights to keep himself above the surface… [T]he wintry waves keep coming, each one seemingly larger than the last. They spin him round, topple him over, force him deeper down and down. Even when he can catch his breath in the few terrified seconds he manages to push his face into the air, he is shaking so badly he can barely get half a lungful before he’s under again. It isn’t enough, grows less each time, and he feels a terrible yearning in his chest as he aches, fruitlessly, for more.’
‘He will die.’
‘And he will die alone.’
‘The sudden, gasping horror of knowing this makes him panic even more. He tries again to break the surface, not daring to think that it might be his last time, not daring to think much at all. He forces his leg to kick, forces his arms to heave himself upward, to at least get his body the right way round, to try and grasp another breath just inches away — ’
‘Then, without warning, the game the sea seems to have been playing, the cruel game of keeping him just alive enough to think he might make it, that game seems to be over.’
Thus, ‘here is the boy, drowning’, and then ‘he dies’.
So the story ended here? Absolutely not!
However, if this boy died and then was found to die — or otherwise, his parents knew this news, felt inconsolable to accept this tragedy, and had to live the rest of their lives with a great deal of courage, the storytelling would then sound like some kinds of newspaper stuff. If the boy rose from the dead, then it would indeed be a thriller out of reality. The miracle here was, the boy, Seth, was still alive rather than returning to his life — and actually, in the novel, he woke up at his old house in England where he lived in his childhood, rather than his current residence in America before his death. But he found himself was alone here, no one in this house, neither in the town outside his house. Did his death truly happen, or was it just a panic nightmare? Seth was not sure, neither did I, as a reader. Gradually, Seth found that he seemed coming into another world, the world which he believed was the ‘hell’. What is more, Seth also seemed losing his memories, yet he was able to recall them by dreaming.
So why Seth chose to commit suicide himself?
For his boyfriend Gudmund — may be, may not be.
Before he died, Seth had three best friends, H (or Harold, but Harold did not like to be called as ‘Harold’, and therefore, the author respected his will and wrote him as ‘H’ in the novel), Monica and Gudmund (‘good man’ in Norwegian). In everyone’s childhood, it would be really normal to have two or three so call core friends around you who you would play together all the time, though sometimes inevitably you would have conflicts with them for some reasons. Herein was the conflict among Seth, Gudmund and Monica which finally led directly or indirectly to Seth’s suicide: Seth and Monica fell in love with Gudmund at the same time (but in the novel Monica claimed that it was she who first loved Gudmund), though Monica and H had developed a romantic relationship. Seth and Gudmund loved each other secretly, and they never exposed their courtship neither before their friends or parents nor in the public, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, all of them included H clearly knew that Monica loved Gudmund crazily. Gudmund faced with the dilemma and he did not want to hurt anyone, neither Seth nor his best friend Monica. He kept his secret courtship with Seth; meanwhile, he also responded to Monica’s pursue and agreed to have sex with her — ‘… he [Gudmund] said he was only sleeping with her because she [Monica] needed him to. That he cared for her as a friend and didn’t know how to handle it so he just gave her what she wanted …’. Nevertheless, Gudmund was clearly aware that ‘I can’t be anyone’s everything … Not even yours, Seth’. Unfortunately, Monica discovered Seth and Gudmund’s secret by chance, which made her feel jealous and angry about Seth and Gudmund’s secret especially when she found the indecent images of them in Gudmund’s mobile phone. Her desire for revenge overpowered their friendship — thanks to her irrational and reckless emotional impulse, she sent those photos to everyone, which then made everyone — included Seth’s and Gudmund’s parents and teachers — know this scandal. Gudmund then dropped out of school and disappeared without saying goodbye to anyone. As for Seth, after Monica and H told him all the truth about this accident, he felt downhearted, and then he cleaned his bedroom and went to the sea to commit suicide — that is, the plot we could read at the beginning of this novel.
The accident of Seth and Gudmund’s romance was just only a part of this plotting — as well as a part of the reasons that caused Seth’s hopelessness about living. Seth thought himself was misunderstood by his parents especially his mother, who seemed only caring more about his little brother, Owen, rather than him. Meanwhile, his father always indulged in his own world and always acted as a peacemaker during the family battle between his son and his wife. Owen, an innocence boy with some cognitive disabilities, often tried his best to play up to his elder brother though Seth less reacted back to Owen’s friendliness. From Seth’s dreams, his life experience was filled with sorrow and trouble, as well as some senses of guilty — in his eighth year, because of his coward, he let a criminal break into their house when their mother was out. The criminal then kidnapped and murdered the four-year-old Owen, which made Seth blame himself.
Form Seth’s life experience, he was lack of trust — trust from his parents and trust from himself. He found himself just like an outsider in his family, and he failed to gain the love from his parent so that he had to turn to friends for compensation — in his dreams, he recalled more memories about him and his friends rather than him and his family. He was lack of a sense of belonging, and that was what Gudmund could give him and satisfy him while also was what Gudmund needed from Seth — since Gudmund also had a more misfortune family. They sympathised with each other because they could understand each other thus fell in love with each other due to their mutual points in life when they were young when they needed each other’s shoulder.
Furthermore, there also existed various senses of guilt. Seth felt guilty about Owen’s death; Seth’s mother felt guilty about her absence; Seth’s father felt guilty about his incompetence as a father for Seth; Gudmund felt guilty toward both Seth and Monica because he still hurt his best friends; Monica felt guilty due to her reckless behaviour; H felt guilty for the reason that he was unable to do something to save their friendship… Different people had their different reasons for guilt, but also for forgiveness and even self-redemption — for example, Seth’s mother could not accept Owen’s death, then she as well as her husband chose self-hypnosis to enter a virtual world, the online world where they could get back Owen in ‘real life situation’ and where Seth chose to suicide and then died.
So the ‘world’ was not real, but which ‘world’ was truly real?
Friedrich Nietzsche once said life is an eternal recurrence. In this novel, Patrick also explored and discussed this philosophical problem in a similar way — what is the ultimate truth of our real world, or what is the reality about our world and our lives? After death, where would we go, heaven or hell, or the ‘world’ beyond the ‘online world’? When he came into the world or the ‘hell’ he called, he began to explore the reality and the truth. Fortunately, he was not alone — except him, there were another two children in some corners in the ‘hell’ due to their death.
Regine, a Black British girl, was abused by her stepfather who finally put down her on the stairs to kill her that she was very upset and angry with her mother’s vacancy. Regine found her mother did not take her responsibility to protect her when her stepfather abused her, but, rather, stood by and watched the misbehaviour happened to her. Because of this particular experiences, Regine showed a strong sense and responsibility to protect her friends even though she had to devote herself when they faced up with dangers. Tomasz, the youngest boy among them, was shot dead by criminal elements when he and his mother tried to smuggle to England because they failed to pay for the large amounts of money to the criminal elements. By the way, the common point existed among them was, they all experienced the worst thing they believed before their death and then came to the ‘hell’ alone. Then they found each other and worked together to explore the ‘hell’.
During Seth and his friends’ adventure, Seth and Regine supposed there existed two parallel components of the world, and the world where they settled was a particular online programme where people lived in virtual reality for self-comfort. In the ‘hell’, all of them not only gradually recalled the memories they temporally lost when arriving at the ‘hell’, but reflected their life experiences especially those misfortunate events happened to them, while during this process, they shared their own stories which helped and enlightened themselves to understand the past from them from the perspective of the another narrator, and gradually they also built up new friendship with each other. They truly needed this friendship because they face up with the threats from the Driver, the Death in this world who often drove a big black van to capture them and manage to bring them back to the Prison, while all the answers they want were at the Prison.
Is that real? This is a core question Seth tried to understand. ‘I’m the only real thing I’ve got’, Seth once believed steadily, but Regine and Tomasz were also the real here, as well as the Driver who could truly hurt or even kill them. But if this world, the ‘hell’ Seth called, was real, then how about that world where they died before. If that world was not real, Seth thought, how about his romance with Gudmund, was Gudmund real, was their love real? And how about Owen? Was Owen alive or died? ‘As he struggles to understand what is happening, the boy dares to hope. Might this not be the end? Might there be more to this life, or perhaps this afterlife?’ But maybe there was no answer about it while Seth still needed to seek for, and that’s why even in the end of the story when they defeated the Driver, Seth still tried to explore the ultimate truth about this world and that world and tried to get back to the world where he died before.
When we are young, we grow up in the circle of making mistakes, reflecting mistakes and then correcting mistakes by ourselves. Youth is totally an adventure which you would never clearly know what would happen next during the journey, only because we are not the director out of our own drama but the actors and actresses as well as the self-directors within the drama without foresight, while surely life itself sometimes is not a drama, or rather than a drama. During his adventure, Seth reflected about his family, his little brother (especially Tomasz reminded his memory of his brother Owen, both of them sometimes seemed a bit too weak to need to be protected), his friendship, as well as his love (not ‘sex’, adopted by Monica’s opinion) — everyone once made their mistakes but everyone needed forgiveness and self-redemption. The boy who once submitted to the threats of criminal and who felt inconsolable to bear the truth about accidents related to his secret romance, gradually grew up and became a man, was not the boy he once was now.
‘Here is the boy, the man, here is Seth, being laid back gently into his coffin, the hands of his friends guiding him into place.’
‘He’s uncertain what’s going to happen next.’
‘But he is certain that that’s actually the point.’
‘If this is all a story, then that’s what the story means.’
‘If it isn’t a story, then the exact same is true.’
The boy who chose to suicide in one world when he was sixteen years old, and then he drowned and he died and then he found himself still alive in a stranger placement, but now he chose to come back. Did he seek for an answer? But there might be no answer. So what did he plan to do? It seemed a bit ambiguous but just ‘[k]now yourself and go in swinging’.
So does the story end? Or is this another beginning?
Well, who knows, it is more than these, just read it and get ready to swing yourself!
